What happened in August: Top stories from startups of Eastern Europe

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The summer has been quiet, but still busy, as I caught up on tons of non-blogging work. Also I have been dutifully clipping news from Eastern European startups which came my way, and here are some selected links I thought may be of interest.

Deal flow

Earlier this summer Russian SEO platform SEO Pultraised $10 million at what could be $100 million+ valuation.

Estonian Pipedrive, the sales management tool in a cloud and an AngelPad graduate, raised $700,000 despite being cash positive, reported Steve O’Hear at TechCrunch. We wrote about Pipedrive last year.

We covered startups that made it to Bulgarian accelerator ELEVEN, and wrote about the finalists of Webit Congress.

Russian KBK Group from my home town Novosibirsk has been accepted to join government incubator Skolkovo, and is now looking for private funding to match Skolkovo grant. The startup, which first appeared on my radar as a result of Startup Sauna warmup in Siberia, optimizes search of graphic information in large databases. The end result will help find similar or identical images on the internet. Think about implications for ecommerce or image copyright protection. Skolkovo has another image search technology company Kuznech as its resident. Bulgarian Imagga has just became a finalist of Webit Congress startup challenge.

Product Launches

A new Ukrainian business incubator Happy Farm has been launched on the outskirts of Kiev. The model offers space, including living quarters, coaching and trips to showcase companies in the US. One of its board members is Vlad Voskresensky, the founder and CEO of InvisibleCRM, the company we wrote about last year. The incubator joins GrowthUp, EastLabs and WannaBiz in hunting the most promising startups. Here is more on the subject (in Russian).

News reviews

Yandex grew its revenue by 50 percent to $207.2 million in the second quarter of 2012, as net income increased by 74 percent to $60,4 million, reported Robin Wauters of The Next Web.

Not that fundamental physics is the subject I understand, but NY Times coverage of Yuri Milner’s new initiative has drawn my attention to the subject. Milner has established a Fundamental Physics Prize, and already awarded it to nine scientists, who received $3 million each. This seems like a fair redistribution of wealth from the money made on social games and daily deals, fields so frivolous in comparison to the issues addressed by the big science.

Free calling and messaging app Viber was reviewed on BusinessWeek under a bold headline “The Skype Killers of Belarus”. The main reason why Viber has been dubbed Belarusian is because its development team is based in Minsk (and we know exactly who those humble folks are). Applying such logic, we can redraw the startup map so that many more tech companies will suddenly come out as Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Romanian etc and we at GoalEurope would have more companies to write about.

Polish startup Use It Better was reviewed by TechCrunch. The company offers gamers recording and analytics. The company aims to explain the gaming companies why 74 percent of gamers never come back to play the game again.

A suggestion has been made by a guest blogger, that startups from Central and Eastern Europe should come to Berlin, rather than San Francisco. As long as you are prepared to learn German to some degree, I would add, otherwise not a bad idea at all.

Upcoming events

We have updated our events section, which now includes Geeks on a Plane, the 500Startups initiative to visit Croatia, Russia, Estonia and Berlin as well as Slush in Helsinki, Startup Weekends across Eastern Europe, Hungarian Innovation Day, Seedcamp Budapest, and Startup Sauna warmups.

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Natasha Starkell

TwitterLinkedInFacebook Google+ Natasha Starkell is the founder and CEO of GoalEurope, advisory firm focusing on technology investment and software development in Russia and Eastern Europe. Prior to starting GoalEurope she has worked in the field of finance, mergers and acquisitions, corporate strategy and offshore outsourcing at Unisys Corporation in Switzerland and United Kingdom. She has an MBA degree from London Business School. She speaks Russian, English and German. She lives in Northern Germany.